Compress Drive and Indexing

Overclocked Like A Mother

I have a mirrored RAID set of drives used for straight storage. I got about 8 gigs left out of 80 gigs room. I was wondering if I should use the Compress Disk to save space feature as well as indexing the drive as well. This is a mapped drive off my main server, not a disk set in my gaming computer.

Tech Junkie

Don't use the compression feature for frequently accessed files, since you'll be opening them often, and you might notice a slowdown when accessing them.

Most tweak sites recommend turning off the Indexing Service, but it's a huge blessing if used correctly. For example, don't index the entire drive. That will eat CPU cycles and disk I/O. Instead, use it on your folder containing documents, for example, or other data that you want to be able to find instantaneously using the Windows Search feature. The advantage of doing this is the service stores information about the filenames and the contents of the files in an index, and if you ever need to search for something, it's very very fast. Plus, you can search for words contained within Word documents etc. which can be very useful. Also remember though, that the more files/folders you choose to index, the more the disk space taken up by the index, so again, stay within limits, and it should work to your advantage

Tech Junkie

Yes, Indexing does take up space, though usually not a whole lot. The amount of space used depends on the number of files being indexed, as well as the amount of content within documents, for example.

The Indexing service on my computer monitors My Documents and certain other folder that I need quick search access to. Basically, about 9000 indexed documents/files have created a 28 MB index so far, so it's not very much at all.

Overclocked Like A Mother

Considering my situation, should I Compress the files and folders in my File/Ftp server? Will accessing the files/folders from my other "Workstations" be hindered because of the compression in my Server tower? Will the FTP side of the server suffer any degredation?

OSNN Veteran Addict

Considering my situation, should I Compress the files and folders in my File/Ftp server?
Depends on what kind of files they are. Many files are already compressed these days. If there are many files smaller than 4 kbytes you could consider splitting up the partition on the server and using a smaller cluster size.

Will accessing the files/folders from my other "Workstations" be hindered because of the compression in my Server tower?
Should not be.

Will the FTP side of the server suffer any degredation?
Is the FTP on a T3? If not there should be no noticable speed degrade. Bandwidth will be your limit not CPU decompress time.

I'm assuming decompression will occur on the server CPU. If you could find an application that let you send compressed then decompress at the recieving computer your transfer time would actually speed up. This freaky little characteristic first started showing up with the first DOS disk compression utilities. Compresion actually started speeding up the HD access. The data file was smaller and got read off the slow disk faster. The CPU overhead to decompress was less than the amount of time to read the larger uncompressed file off the disk.

Ep, glad to see you come back and tidy up...did want to ask a one day favor, I want to enhance my resume , was hoping you could make me administrator for a day, if so, take me right off since I won't be here to do anything, and don't know the slightest about the board, but it would be nice putting "served administrator osnn", if can do, THANKS